No, this is not the Australian cricket team making two declarations in a test match. It is the prospect of the Australian government having to face the dissolution of Parliament and an election by the end of the year.
Miranda Devine says, bring it on!
Bring it on, Labor, pull that trigger
Miranda Devine
August 15, 2009
When the Government's chief climate change science adviser, Professor Will Steffen, was asked to participate in an open debate this week for the benefit of senators about to vote on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill, he refused. Instead, he sent the independent senator Steve Fielding a letter belittling the scientist he was asked to debate.
Steffen, a research chemist with an interest in "Earth System science", accused Professor Bob Carter, a palaeoclimatologist, and other eminent scientists who have questioned the Government's scientific advice, of "flawed logic, misleading and inaccurate statements and confused and inconsistent analyses" not even worthy of university science students.
Steffen's reasons for his no-show? "By going there I would have given exactly the wrong impression, simply by being there, that there is a debate."
Steffen's attitude flies in the face of 1000 years of scientific method - of open inquiry, of encouraging the objective search for truth, sharing knowledge, testing hypotheses, welcoming challenges in order to demonstrate the robustness of your theories or help you develop new ones.
Something stinks in the climate science industry. The confected sense of urgency. The comic predictions by the United Nations that we have only "four months" to save the planet or that next year as many as 50 million climate refugees will be "displaced" by human-caused climate change. The fantasy that imposing a new tax on Australians will make any difference to the age-old phenomenon of climate change.
Here we had the Senate voting on Thursday on what both sides describe as one of the most significant pieces of legislation since Federation. Yet there has been little debate about the impact on jobs, household budgets, agriculture and industry, on electricity, gas and petrol prices, no consideration of nuclear energy, and scarce information about how we will do without the cheap baseload energy from coal-fired power stations which underpins Australia's high standard of living. Instead we have McCarthyist bullying of critics. At least Fielding, an engineer, is strong-minded enough to seek his own answers.
As it happened on Wednesday, the day before the vote, just 13 MPs and senators showed up to the debate he organised that had become a one-man talk by Carter. None were from the Government. Just 6 per cent of the Parliament could spare an hour to hear what the fuss was about.
What misgivings did Carter and three other scientists advising Fielding (the climatologist William Kininmonth, the former head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology National Climate Centre; the hydro-climatologist Dr Stewart Franks; and the mathematician Dr David Evans, the former Australian Greenhouse Office carbon modeller) have about the science underpinning the Government's legislation?
Even if you reject the sceptical view, Australia produces just 1 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions so if we were to shut down the country, the impact on global climate would still be negligible.
The Government is determined to resubmit its legislation to the Senate in November, under the threat of a double dissolution election, so that it is completed before the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. Malcolm Turnbull is busy drafting amendments in an attempt to make the legislation palatable.
But the Coalition should embrace a double dissolution on climate change. Bring it on. Call the Government's bluff. It'll be their best chance of winning back office for years.
As Barnaby Joyce reminded everyone this week, by winning the "unwinnable" 1993 election, Paul Keating showed John Hewson how difficult it was to go to the Australian people with a new tax - which is what the emissions trading scheme is - an energy tax.
In Turnbull, the Coalition has the perfect man for the job of winning an election on an energy tax. He is enough of a genuine climate change alarmist to reassure green-minded voters, yet he is also a successful capitalist who knows the value of preserving a healthy economy.
Crafting complex deals, such as an ETS that might work, is his forte.
It's probably his only chance of being prime minister, so he will fight for all he's worth.
An early election will also force the Coalition to rally behind its leader, removing the unsettling effect of all that free speech they are currently engaging in. Plus it's just the kind of reckless gamble for which Turnbull is famed, and which he occasionally pulls off. It's right up his alley, if Utegate hasn't taken all his bottle.
You can bet money from industry would roll into Coalition coffers to help fight such an election, easily rivalling the union advertising largesse against Work Choices in the last poll.
And as Steve Fielding has found from the supportive emails and letters flooding his office, the public mood is turning resolutely against rash measures to stop climate change.
A Newspoll last month found 53 per cent of Australians want the Government to delay the ETS legislation until after Copenhagen, or not introduce it at all. Six per cent are uncommitted.
Only 41 per cent think Australia should pass the legislation before Copenhagen.
So what's the big hurry? In the Senate on Thursday after losing the vote, Penny Wong revealed the reason: "Because if we don't [bring the bill back in November], this nation goes to Copenhagen with no means to deliver on its targets.'' It's to give Kevin Rudd something to strut with on the global stage.
New Zealand is going through its own conniptions over climate change. The government's Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman has recently come out asserting that the need to take action to stop the world heating up is beyond discussion now.
He uses a remarkably definite scientific term to justify his position:
The vast majority of the world’s climate scientists consider it very likely, based on several lines of evidence, that the current warming trend is of human origin and is associated with increased production of the so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ as a result of fossil fuel use, agriculture and deforestation. (Emphasis, ours)Care to quantify that, Professor. The vast majority consists of 93.67%? Or 51.35%? Or, what? This is not a scientific argument or analysis, it is advocacy. True to form, Gluckman asserts that if we don't do something, everyone will suffer. But all suffering is not equal, is it Professor. However, like the truly objective scientist he is, he does not attempt to quantify the suffering or the dispersion of suffering that will result from "taking action". He acknowledges there will be costs, but is unable to specify, quantify, or provide cost-benefits.
All the attempts at such analysis we have read end up acknowledging that it is the poorer and more vulnerable people on the planet that will pay by far and above the larger costs when carbon is taxed in the vain attempt to prevent global warming. That is why the West is so gung ho about taking action: the real serious costs will not be in its back yard.
Yet, even so, the ardour of electorates in the West for more taxes to "mitigate" global warming is rapidly cooling. We believe we are approaching the point where governments are going to commit electoral suicide if they push ahead with carbon taxes. It will be intriguing to see who blinks first.
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